As the title says, we’re relocating to the Glasgow area for my husband’s job. He’ll be commuting 3 days a week, while I work from home. This means we can be more flexible in location as it won’t be a daily event.
Ideally we’d like somewhere semi-rural but which has reasonable transport links to Glasgow centre (public transport). We don’t know the wider area at all, as all friends are city-based. Is this plausible? Are there any areas where we could narrow our search to (my husband is up there currently and has been taking the train around, but because Glasgow is so big there are so many potential places and have no idea where to start)?
General requirements that might be useful: we have no children and won’t be having any, so schools are of no concern, but I’d like a large garden at minimum, with an acre+ of land ideal. I keep chickens and want a bigger flock than what I can currently fit in the garden of my 3 bed ex-council semi! I’d also like to be more self sufficient in general. My husband and I both grew up with large gardens in which fruit/veg were grown, and I want the room to do that on a larger scale. We’d want at least 2 bedrooms and either room in the house for a study, or room outside for a garden office (which is what I have now).
We have lived semi-rurally before in Lancashire (only shop in village was a small Spar, population of the local area which had 3 villages was 2k) so we know what that entails). We aren’t looking for a ‘nice’ area particularly, as we lived in the mainly council side of our village in Lancashire and on a mainly council estate now in the midlands. We have always got on well with neighbours.
Budget is probably £400k, with a tiny bit of wiggle room. We know that Scotland has an offers over system, so how much lower than £400k should we be looking at in our search? Do we need to have sold our house in England before making an offer (rather than just accepting an offer)? We shouldn’t have a big chain as we’d be a first or second time buyer’s house, but I don’t want to jeopardise anything with such a big move!
Thanks for any advice you can give (even if it’s ‘don’t be ridiculous, you can’t get that’ so we know to lower our ambitions).